Marvel Previews for 18 January include Marvel Knights 4 #26 [Newsarama]
Wow, it's hard-luck being a Dr. Strange fan. You think it's the rantings of a mean old crazy fan, eh? Neilalien keeps telling you... Check out these preview pages. Looks like the Marvel Knights 4 story arc is more of the same old Doc appearances and guest-starrings, and not an actual team-up or anything. A "spell of containment" prevents Doc from leaving the Sanctum and accompanying the Fantastic Four on their adventure. Is that lame or what!? Plus, all Reed has to do is read the incantation on the scroll- so once again, any schmuck can do Dr. Strange's powers. Can everyone in the Marvel Universe stretch, or design high-tech armor? Just like Doc in Amazing Spider-Man #42 (and countless others): Doc can't go with Spidey because he's got an "appointment with Death", but he can give Spidey this doohickey so he can work magic himself all alone unescorted in a dangerous alien mystical dimension. And didn't Doc just give Reed Richards a spell to cast without him in the recent FF Unthinkable storyline? Sheesh! Stop this broken record already and throw us Doc fans a bone... Anger rising...

The Mangaversion of Doc figures prominently in the preview pages of New Mangaverse #1 at the above link too.

Marvel announces cosmic Annihilation [Newsarama] [Comic Book Resources] [Keith Giffen interview]
An epic involving the "space-faring" cosmic types like Silver Surfer, Super-Skrull, Nova, Drax The Destroyer, Thanos, Quasar, etc. Dr. Strange doesn't seem involved, which is just as well- like the Infinity Whatevers, it's an awful lot of books to get the whole story, and Doc may not be a good fit with this kind of "cosmic".

1. On "a settlement means that this lawsuit had merit": Not necessarily. It could well be that Marvel saw a big fat defeat on the horizon, and bailed, and pushed for an announcement of the face-saving "terms-undisclosed" "we both still care about intellectual property rights" "settlement" variety that sounds better than "lawsuit dropped". Who knows, we're not privvy to the details, Marvel probably got some concerns assured, maybe more policing of the servers for blatant character copies- but "there will be no changes to the City of Heroes/Villains character creation engine" is clearly a Marvel loss. Since Marvel's complaint was so much about said engine somehow encouraging people to copy Marvel properties.

2. On "past descriptions of this lawsuit have been histrionics": It wasn't an overreaction. Strong reactions to this lawsuit have mostly been on the meta "how are creators/providers of (open-ended) (computer/online) services responsible for what users of those services do with them" level, like is Yahoo liable if someone uses a Yahoo email account to send death threats. And Neilalien's no lawyer-head (but it's been the lawyer-heads who have said Marvel's "suing NCsoft for giving people the ability to enact the digital equivalent of making a Spider-Man costume and wearing it in their backyard"!). But we can try to keep this tightly focused on CR's comments.

As CR understands it, Marvel was not insanely-as-portrayed attacking an innocent neutral mechanism of character creation (like a box of crayons) that makes the rendition of property-infringing characters simply possible. But rather- and any straightforward reading of Marvel's original complaint like CR's shows this- that Marvel was arguing that the City of Heroes mechanism/process of character creation is not neutral, but instead, its "very structure and flow" is biased to encourage the infringing creation of characters belonging to Marvel. They've built a distinctly Marvel character-creation tool/game without Marvel's permission. It's as if the pen-and-paper Champions RPG official rulebook included examples of Marvel characters without permission. It's HeroMachine (go click, have fun with it, if you don't already know City of Heroes) but with pro-Marvel-copying shenanigans somehow (default skin color for brick characters is green with ripped pants?) and without a (an enforced, or more accurately, unenforceable token) disclaimer. A fair enough thing to go after in our capitalitigious age.

As Neilalien understands it, here's the problem: Marvel's complaint sure reads like, at least in Marvel's eyes in the video game realm, that there can be no neutral mechanism, no non-Marvel box of crayons, for the creation of superheroes with superpowers. Any mechanism/process that includes the possibility of/does not police against the combined options of mutant origin, hand-to-hand fighter, swipe claws, fast healing, yellow costume, cigar in mouth, etc., among thousands of other choices and combinations is an infringement of the Wolverine trademark [p. 7 of Marvel's second amended complaint]. Simply being able to create a large green man in short pants "enables (indeed, encourages)" infringement [complaint p. 8]. It's even suggested that the maker of any open-ended character-creation mechanism, to avoid any infringement litigation, would have to pre-own any possible characters that users could create [complaint p. 2], and actively police any possible instance Marvel considers an infringement [complaint p. 23] (much more than City of Heroes' infringing-name Block List (from Day One no one could name their character Wolverine)). This is going after the Champions RPG itself. On the intellectual-property continuum, with a competitor's Arachno-Man comic book on one end and an artist's brush on the other, that's a pretty greedy-grabby and chilling-effect place for Marvel to draw its line- from making City of Heroes dead or suck via drastically-reduced user options and overpolicing grey-area characters on one end, to chilling the development of any open-ended system of any kind that could be used in a copyright-infringing way.

Marvel thinks that the video-game licensing-ability of its character-properties is negatively affected if anything remotely like its character-properties appear in any other video game in any other way. Marvel was trying to hold the developers/publishers of an open-ended superhero game responsible for player-created content, for what players did with those open game possibilities on their servers, and thus for having any open game possibilities at all. Marvel apparently can or thinks it can go after anything that could be used to generate a large green man with pants.

The crayon analogy might be better with slightly more context: It sounds like Marvel suing Crayola for infringement for releasing a crayon box with a "Draw your favorite comic book heroes!" splash on it, because (1) Crayola owns no comic book heroes that kids could possibly draw, so they must be referring to Marvel characters ("and others"); (2) the box includes blue and red crayons, which "enables, indeed encourages", kids to draw Spider-Man; (3) there's no system in place to prevent the drawing of Marvel characters, which also means encouragement; (4) and Crayola has now diluted and damaged Marvel's ability to put out its own line of crayons, because Marvel owns anything that's combined with the "comic book hero" meme, etc.

For this analogy to be tight, we must also add an anomalous (5) though: it's happening on NCsoft's servers, which might be akin to the kids coming to the Crayola corporate office to do the drawing, and Marvel's arguing that Crayola could do something more about it then. (First, Marvel contacted NCsoft that infringing characters were in the game, and a DMCA Notification to remove ("take down") infringing characters [Order denying Marvel motions p. 2]. NCsoft replied that names of Marvel characters were already on the Block List. Marvel sent a second DMCA Notification, What about Wolverine99, etc.? NCsoft complied. Then Marvel sued that any Marvel-like characters (regardless of name) were infringing, and the character-creation engine was encouraging it. Then NCsoft claimed it was under DMCA "internet service provider" "safe harbor" protection. Marvel then wanted the courts to determine if NCsoft was or not [complaint p. 31-32]; the Court dodged that one as "inappropriately seeking an advance ruling on a potential affirmative defense" [Court's motion to dismiss order, p. 7].)

CR seems to be brushing the suit off too as merely (6) against "prominent sample doppelgangers": like Marvel arguing that Crayola corporate then ran "Look at what you can draw! Look at what other kids have drawn!" TV commercials and all the drawings and ads are of Marvel-esques. The main thrust here, the most prominent alleged doppelganger of all, is a supposedly endorsement-confusing Captain-America-esque "Statesman", City of Heroes' mascot, on the box [complaint p. 24] (image added above). The Court never dismissed direct common-law trademark infringement [dismiss order p. 5] (the only one of the six infringement combinations (direct/contributory/vicarious, registered/common law) that wasn't dismissed), so that part of the lawsuit was still alive. But c'mon: Marvel went after this guy for the white chest star [complaint p. 25; with brazen Magneto-like helm p. 5-6]- NCsoft argued that it's a part of the US flag and a patriotic emblem, and not like a Superman S or Batman bat symbol [NCsoft's motion to dismiss p. 14]- he doesn't even have a shield! This is the Captain America clone making people think it's a Marvel-sanctioned game? This is the most prominent doppelganger? The registered-trademark angle was dismissed: the judge said Marvel owns only the wordmark "Captain America", and no one's going to confuse the words "Statesman" with "Captain America" [dismiss order p. 4]. (Does this wordmark-only ruling bode ill for any Marvel-requested in-game policing beyond a character-name Block list?)

Anyway, each of these bites are in the complaint, and together it's a huge crappy non-histrionic chunk of what this lawsuit is apparently about.

(Update: Be sure to read the interesting p. 5 of the Court's dismiss order, re: the Judge noting that game users are not themselves using Marvel trademarks for commerce among themselves, for more on the "open-ended services liable for what users do with them" meta angle.)

An informal poll of Dr. Strange Uber-Collectors and uber-collectors in general: What have you done with your collecting copy of Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme Annual #3? If you're not in the club nodding knowingly already: it was one of those polybagged monstrosities of the early 90's. Have you kept it in the polybag? This FAQ on Usenet from 01998 strongly advises taking it out. Is there any other better info on this? Have you kept the polybag? Thrown it out altogether? Where are you keeping the Killian card? Do we have a kept-in and taken-out issue we can fun-experiment with to compare for damage from the polybag? Do retailers find that collectors scoff if the comic is without its polybag?

POW! Entertainment has acquired the exclusive rights and ownership in perpetuity to the name "Stan Lee," his likeness, brand
and signature slogans "Stan Lee Presents", "Excelsior" and "Stan's Soap Box" [PR Newswire]
Stan is Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of POW!, so does this mean he's bought these things of himself from Marvel?

Also on tap are the Mindless Ones from an old Dr. Strange story. "After they finish rampaging and killing people, they get bored. They start taking people's clothes and skateboards. I've got this shot of eight mindless ones wearing baseball caps on backwards on skateboards, trundling in a sinister manner towards the camera."

Japanese writer Fujiko F. Fujio has published 40 million copies of his Doremon collection in Vietnam so far, a record number of copies for a foreign collection of comic books in Vietnam [Voice of Vietnam] [via WFC News]

The Government Manual for New Superheroes is a tongue-in-cheek guide for choosing a name, designing a costume, finding an arch nemesis, deciding to have a sidekick [Amazon.com] [New York Newsday] [via WFC News]

Interview with Scott Seely, Executive Director of 826 NYC at The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company [Pulse]

"If you don't know who Dr. Strange is... uhm... think Dumbledore, just way cooler" [The Tao of Steven]
Inspired by the Shamballa graphic novel. But it used to be, "If you don't know who Dumbledore is... uhm... think Dr. Strange, just way lamer..." Sigh...

But the thing is... when Marvel puts out a TPB of Englehart's Avengers: Serpent Crown storyline and I compare it to modern Marvel superhero comic books, it's like night and day for me. I don't care if it dates me... I think the 70's comics were better on quite a few levels that have nothing to do with how far we've all advanced in our craft.

Doc Sighting: Marvel Holiday Special
The heroes' party is at the Sanctum Sanctorum this year. Some good gags (Gravity, the mistletoe, the tree Doc conjures, etc.) Read it in the shop if you love the Marvel U.

Caught up with Ultimates 2 #6, the Defenders issue. A very enjoyable issue! A little bummed that the Defenders name is attached to this band of nonsuperpowered losers- but at least Dr. Strange wasn't really involved.

Hmmm... a few months after Neilalien shares his childhood comic Black Jack #1, out comes Amazing Fantasy #15 with a character called Blackjack by Dan Slott in some comedic vignettes. Call the lawyers!Funny Slott editor anecdote: "I want Bladerunner, and you're giving me Star Wars" [CBR Forums] [via All The Rage]

Writing in The New Republic in 1948, Marya Mannes referred to the form as "intellectual marijuana." "Every hour spent in reading comics," she asserted, "is an hour in which all inner growth has stopped."

The Cheapening of Comics: Bill Watterson speech, delivered at the Festival of Cartoon Art, Ohio State University, 27 October 01989 [PlanetCartoonist] [via xBlog]

Judge dismisses four of seven counts against retailer Gordon Lee, including the two felony ones [Comic Book Legal Defense Fund] [Newsarama]
Only, er, "Only" three misdemeanor counts of Distribution of Harmful to Minors Material remain. C'mon guys, one crime, one count- there were not seven "crimes" here (actually, there were none, in this website's opinion).

In an industry that's only recently stopped hemorrhaging readership, it still amazes me how little outreach is done to expand beyond the direct market's core audience of twenty- and thirty-something white boys and their myopic fixation on superheroes.

"Beware their anger": The wrath of comic fans hate! [The Comics Asylum]
The creator's dilemma: appear uninterested in the fans, or open oneself up to fan vitriol.
Excellent response to some aspects of the above link: Comics message-board fandom chaos isn't what's keeping people away from the medium [The Low Road]

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